had left her home and the life in Normandy she loved, to throw herself into Paris as into the sea. The dead soldier, however, had been mustered out before the malarial fever, contracted in the swamps of the Landes, had developed itself, and the pension could not be obtained. The disappointment was a bitter one, made worse by the fact that Mère Marchette had been told by one and another that the claim would have been granted had the case been properly managed. The poor old creature could not escape a feeling of self-blame[169] in thinking that it was her want of keenness which had deprived Pierre of his pension. Her grandson for her represented the world, and to him she devoted all her energies. She toiled for him, and watched and suffered with that unselfish egotism possible only to the old and lonely.

Everybody

[169]

Fortunately Pierre was a good lad, who returned his grandmother’s love with a devotion hardly less complete than her own. They lived together in two attic rooms, where they passed the evenings sitting in the dark and talking of their Normandy home. They recalled the past and built endless air castles of the time when they should be able to return. They had grand plans of repurchasing the old cot where both of them had been born, and which had been lost by the foreclosure of a mortgage after the long illness of Pierre’s father had ended. They were never tired of talking of what they would do then, and of devising little ways in which the worn-out old farm might be made more profitable. They remained as truly children of the soil as if they had been still in Normandy instead of in their attic in the midst of Paris.

In the daytime Mère Marchette went out to do work as charwoman, while Pierre had[170] been fortunate enough to obtain a place as assistant in a little grocery in Rue M. le Prince. It was in connection with this that Pierre gave his grandmother the only real grief he ever caused her while they were together. Suddenly the boy began to stay away in the evening, and when Mère Marchette sought to know the reason he put her questions aside. One evening as she was making her way home she saw her grandson chatting with a girl at the door of a milliner’s dingy shop. The heart of poor old Mère Marchette sunk within her. The castles in the air, from whose glittering towers had shone delusive lights to strengthen and encourage her, fell in ruins before her eyes. In a moment the burden of her age, her poverty, her weariness, seemed increased tenfold. Feebly she climbed the long stairs and sat down to wait, heartbroken. She had all the peasant’s 

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